The Beast on the East RiverBy: Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 27, 2006

My first real exposure to the United Nations Organization (as the UN was called at the beginning) was with an episode in American history on which Nathan Tabor concludes his thoughtful, prodigiously researched, and richly sourced new book, The Beast on the East River. It was the battle over the proposed “Bricker Amendment” to the United States Constitution.

As college students in 1953, my contemporaries and I were bombarded with propaganda about how the newly-born UNO—grand-parented by Stalin and FDR, and parented by the likes of traitor Alger Hiss—was mankind’s last best hope to end the scourge of war and create a world of goodness.

Among the few important public figures who realized that the supra-national UN, because of its charter and proposed activities, would pose a serious threat to United States sovereignty—“. . . all treaties . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land . . . any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding”—was Senator John Bricker of Ohio.

Bricker’s proposal, eventually failing by one vote in the senate, was revised several times.One later version, the so-called George Amendment, provided that “[a] provision of a treaty or other international agreement which conflicts with this Constitution shall not be of any force or effect,” and that “[a]n international agreement other than a treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only by an act of the Congress.”

Regrettably, the Bricker Amendment’s failure left in doubt the questionable nexus between the UN treaty and the American Constitution.Also, the proposal’s repudiation was seen as an endorsement of the United Nations Organization which, despite its modest beginnings in San Francisco and Lake Success, has today grown to be a rights-devouring, collectivism-spreading, money-stealing colossus—an indictment that Mr. Tabor not only lays, but convincingly proves.

On an individual level, we learn about predatory “peacekeepers” as rapists, murderers, and sex slave traffickers; about nepotistic appointees that would shame even Chicago democrats; about bureaucrats who excel at cover ups; about wheelers-and-dealers like Kofi Annan’s son, skimming billions from the UN-administered Iraq “oil for food” program.About poseurs, dilettantes, socialists, thugs and criminals.

On an institutional level, we learn about a blind eye to the Rwanda and Darfur genocide; about insidious subversion of America’s educational system; about a scheme to tax our citizens to support the organization’s world government goals; about UNESCO’s drive to “re-orient the moral compass of the planet” economically, politically, intellectually, and esthetically; about presidential approval of international control over some of our nation’s most important landmarks; about the threat to private property rights through environmental strategies; about the control of procreation in the name of resource conservation; about the internationalization of natural resources; about open borders; about the potentially devastating surrender of American jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court; and, in the end, about a world army commanded by UN Secretariat bureaucrats (who will have first disarmed all American citizens)—no doubt with troops from such countries as Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Zaire, Uganda, Venezuela, and Cuba.

In sum, Mr. Tabor has shown us the world through the eyes of, not only the world government collectivists who populate the UN and its multitudinous offspring like UNESCO, but also as seen by American presidents like George H.W. Bush, who proclaimed a “New World Order” following our defeat of Iraq in Gulf War I, William Jefferson Clinton, who never saw a UN boondoggle he couldn’t cozy up to, and George W. Bush, who took the United States back into the avaricious swindle known as UNESCO.

And Mr. Tabor has made his case decisively.

There have been far too many propagandistic diatribes against the UN that have been self-defeating because of their strident tone, frequent factual inaccuracies, and lack of clear focus.

Nathan Tabor’s The Beast on the East River, however—whose goal he describes as “a commonsense analysis of how the current, generally anti-American agenda of the UN is fundamentally at odds with the values and beliefs of most conservatives in America today”—is a welcome departure from that genre.His book provides a measured intellectual argument against allowing the corrupt collectivist internationalists of the UN, and its many metastasized affiliates, to undermine and eventually steal one of America’s most precious possessions: its sovereignty.

Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at BrooklynLawSchool, is a constitutional lawyer and author
most recently of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006, A
Conservative’s
Perspective.

We have implemented a new commenting system. To use it you must login/register with disqus. Registering is simple and can be done while posting this comment itself. Please contact gzenone [at] horowitzfreedomcenter.org if you have any difficulties.